This chapter concentrates on Berlin’s propensity for staging encounters with urban virtuality, the multiple temporalities that the built city displays, particularly at the fraught site of Potsdamer ...
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This chapter concentrates on Berlin’s propensity for staging encounters with urban virtuality, the multiple temporalities that the built city displays, particularly at the fraught site of Potsdamer Platz, once divided by the East-West border and before the Second World War, a major urban node. Examining the turning point of the late 1980s and early 1990s as a shift from purely cinematic explorations of place to new media ones, this chapter focuses on the Potsdamer Platz sequence of Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (1987) and Art + Com’s new media archival project, The Invisible Shape of Things Past (1995-present) and posits cartographic indexicality as a postwall strategy for countering and controlling urban nostalgia.Less

Brigitta B. Wagner

Published in print: 2015-12-01

This chapter concentrates on Berlin’s propensity for staging encounters with urban virtuality, the multiple temporalities that the built city displays, particularly at the fraught site of Potsdamer Platz, once divided by the East-West border and before the Second World War, a major urban node. Examining the turning point of the late 1980s and early 1990s as a shift from purely cinematic explorations of place to new media ones, this chapter focuses on the Potsdamer Platz sequence of Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (1987) and Art + Com’s new media archival project, The Invisible Shape of Things Past (1995-present) and posits cartographic indexicality as a postwall strategy for countering and controlling urban nostalgia.

Berlin Replayed explores the role of film revival and production in the construction of Berlin’s city image and film geographies at several distinct moments in history: the ‘Golden’ Twenties, the ...
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Berlin Replayed explores the role of film revival and production in the construction of Berlin’s city image and film geographies at several distinct moments in history: the ‘Golden’ Twenties, the divided but pre-Wall 1950s, the political turning point of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the start of the new millennium. This book argues for the importance of moving images and cultural policy in fostering collective urban nostalgia in the face of the city’s renewed function as the all-German capital. Understanding films as complex, intertextual archives of place in audiovisual dialogue with changes in the built city, Berlin Replayed approaches successive ‘New’ Berlins from the vantage point of the postwar, postwall city and its film industry—both enmeshed in coming to terms with the structural damage of the Second World War and the legacy of a politically and physically divided cityscape. Combining medium specific approaches with cultural historical and film analytical ones, this study focuses on four key problems raised by the relationship between film geography, profilmic urban space, film revival culture, and the production of cinematic space: 1. remake: how cities remake films and how films remake cities; 2. generation: how films created generational geographical affiliations that ran counter to official demarcations of space; 3. virtuality: how films and new media differ in their representations of Berlin’s layered past and their solutions to lost urban spaces in time; and 4. orientation: how filmic constructions of cinematic urban space instruct spectators in the perception of the changing built city.Less

Berlin Replayed : Cinema and Urban Nostalgia in the Postwall Era

Brigitta B. Wagner

Published in print: 2015-12-01

Berlin Replayed explores the role of film revival and production in the construction of Berlin’s city image and film geographies at several distinct moments in history: the ‘Golden’ Twenties, the divided but pre-Wall 1950s, the political turning point of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the start of the new millennium. This book argues for the importance of moving images and cultural policy in fostering collective urban nostalgia in the face of the city’s renewed function as the all-German capital. Understanding films as complex, intertextual archives of place in audiovisual dialogue with changes in the built city, Berlin Replayed approaches successive ‘New’ Berlins from the vantage point of the postwar, postwall city and its film industry—both enmeshed in coming to terms with the structural damage of the Second World War and the legacy of a politically and physically divided cityscape. Combining medium specific approaches with cultural historical and film analytical ones, this study focuses on four key problems raised by the relationship between film geography, profilmic urban space, film revival culture, and the production of cinematic space: 1. remake: how cities remake films and how films remake cities; 2. generation: how films created generational geographical affiliations that ran counter to official demarcations of space; 3. virtuality: how films and new media differ in their representations of Berlin’s layered past and their solutions to lost urban spaces in time; and 4. orientation: how filmic constructions of cinematic urban space instruct spectators in the perception of the changing built city.